At-home pet euthanasia hard to find. Fresno company’s growing business called ‘a gift’

Diane Ramos was at a loss when her Big Boy was diagnosed with a neurological disease that left him unable to walk.

She adopted the 120-pound dog from Bully Rescue seven years ago and recently noticed he’d been slowing down some; he wasn’t his usually derpy self. She thought it was arthritis.

When she found out it was something else, something that would ultimately prove fatal, the idea of taking him to a veterinarian office to be put down seemed “unimaginable,” for logistical reasons alone.

“I was really traumatized,” Ramos says.

“My head was all over the place.”

Her feelings are not unique, says Bethany Hsia, a veterinarian and co-founder of CodaPet, which started in Fresno this summer and offers end-of-life services through personalized at-home visits.

“Pet owners can struggle,” Hsia says, especially with the timing of things.

“Is it today? Is it tomorrow?” She struggled with that idea herself when her own dog was diagnosed with bone cancer.

“Is it next week? Should I have done it last week?”

Those stresses are often compounded, for both the pet and its family, with the fear and anxiety of a trip to a veterinarian office, she says.

Then, there’s the inevitable trip home.

Of course, watching a pet go through death unassisted can be equally traumatic, says CodaPet co-founder Karen Whala, who has been specializing in at-home end-of-life care for five years.

People have an idea of what natural death is, but they “don’t know what that looks like.” They expect that maybe their pets will just go to sleep at the end and not wake up, Whala says.

“They don’t do that naturally.”

CodaPet works to take away any fear or anxiety in the process, with a set of online resources to help pet parents navigate the process. That includes talking with their regular vet and a quality-of-life assessment that owners can use to evaluate a pet’s condition. It can be taken multiple times over several days or weeks.

When the time is right, “we arrive like we are a guest in the home,” Whala says.

The visits, which Whala calls “un-rushed,” can last anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours. In that time, the veterinarian observes the pet and family. There is a visual inspection, and sometimes a physical one, and the pet gets a relaxing sedative prior to the final injection. The whole thing is designed to be subtle, she says.

Owners often include their children, other family, even other pets into the process.

The company provides for several aftercare options, including private cremation, burial or donation of the remains to teaching hospitals.

This is a final gift that owners can give their pets, Whala says, and the doctors are “happy to be a part of it.”

There are some mobile veterinarians who offer this kind of in-home care as part of their full slate of services, but few do it full-time, and the awareness of it as an option is still relatively low, Hsia says. Veterinarians are catching up with the fact that pets have become more like family than they may have been in the past. At the same time, consumers have become accustomed to the idea of concierge, in-home services for almost everything, including grocery shopping.

“The need is going to increase with awareness,” she says.

CodaPet currently has four licensed veterinarians operating out of Fresno in an area stretching from Oakhurst and Madera to Tulare and Visalia.

Last month, it expanded its reach by adding a doctor in the Oklahoma City region of Oklahoma.

For now, people mostly find the company through word-of-mouth, though it does gets referrals from veterinarian clinics.

Ramos found the company through a Google search for the word “euthanasia.”

She’s happy she did.

“I didn’t know what to do.”

She says she can’t thank the doctor enough.

Big Boy died, at home, the day before Thanksgiving. He was in his bed, surrounded by Ramos, her sisters and mother.

“I could not imagine a better way to let someone go than like that,” she says.

“They made a traumatizing event beautiful.”